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Bookend; Way Behind Every Great Man . . .

Hats off to the helpmeet! Her long-suffering martyrdom has paid off, and she's finally getting her due -- from feminists, no less. A few years back, to champion her cause was career suicide. Remember Beatrice Nest, the middle-aged English professor in A. S. Byatt's ''Possession,'' who toiled, mocked by colleagues and snubbed by students, in the basement of the British Museum? Her mistake? Devoting three decades and her scholarly reputation to a Victorian housewife named Ellen Ash, the spouse of an Eminent Victorian. Years of work on her diaries and letters had revealed only that Ellen was dutiful and dull. Who wanted to read about Ellen when you could read her husband's poetry instead?

The Ashes were intended as recognizable types. Think Lord and Lady Tennyson, Thomas and Jane Carlyle or Charles Dickens and that woman who bore him 10 children. As for Beatrice Nest, she's a cautionary tale. The feminist academy, Byatt understood, was interested in talented go-getters, not housewives: Georges like Eliot and Sand (who dressed in drag), enduring slander to write; women like Edith Wharton, a young lady by day who spent her nights secretly scribbling. Abstention was no way to earn accolades. Trying and failing, or suffering a gross injustice, on the other hand, was: Zelda Fitzgerald, for years little more than a dizzy flapper in the annals of literary history, was promptly promoted to feminist heroine when it came out that her husband had pilfered shamelessly from her letters and diaries. As Zelda dryly put it, Scott ''seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.''

Anecdotes like this have been feminism's lifeblood, proof that behind every Great Man there is an equally talented woman. Virginia Woolf set forth the template in ''A Room of One's Own'' when she enumerated the horrors (sexual slavery, suicide) almost certainly awaiting Shakespeare's hypothetical gifted sister. Woolf's fantasy gave way to feminist bromide: if a woman's genius remained unknown to posterity, it was because her voice had been censored by a jealous and insecure man, or -- lacking a flesh-and-blood male -- by the jealous and insecure patriarchy itself.

But now feminists have fallen in love with the helpmeet. Lately we've seen publication of unabashed paeans to the submissive spouse, all by literary critics of the highest order. Elegant, delightful and scrupulously researched, Francine du Plessix Gray's ''At Home With the Marquis de Sade'' makes extraordinary claims -- not about the infamous pornographer but about his altogether unremarkable wife. Gray does not argue for Renee-Pelagie de Montreuil de Sade's literary gifts or the superiority of her erotic imagination. No, for Gray her genius lay in her unwavering conventionality, her resolute ordinariness, her uncomplaining acceptance of her role as wife and mother.

Without question, Pelagie was one hell of a wife. She held her head high while her husband cavorted with other women, and stood by him through sex scandals and jail terms. She sold her jewels to buy off witnesses, besieged the French authorities and paid him conjugal visits behind bars. During the marquis's decade-long tour through the Parisian jails, Pelagie lived austerely in a convent to afford her husband's room and board and the endless supply of gourmet treats and luxury goods he demanded. And what was the point of all this wifely subservience? Great art. Sade might conceivably have made the tabloids of the ancien regime, but without Pelagie's tireless ministrations he would never have been a writer: ''Her marriage had been her work of art: for good or for worse, it was solely through Pelagie's love and dedication that the Marquis de Sade's talents were able to flower and become part of the Western heritage.''

Gray, it turns out, is far from alone. You don't have to read beyond the title of Stacy Schiff's biography to get the idea: ''Vera: (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov).'' As Schiff tells us early on, ''From the list of things Nabokov bragged about never having learned to do -- type, drive, speak German, retrieve a lost object, fold an umbrella, answer the phone, cut a book's pages, give the time of day to a philistine -- it is easy to deduce what Vera was to spend her life doing.'' Nabokov described his wife as ''business manager, chauffeuse and assistant butterfly catcher all rolled into one,'' a list to which Schiff adds a dozen other terms: ''disciple, bodyguard, secretary-protector, handmaiden, buffer, monitor, quotation-finder, groupie, advance man, professional understudy, nursemaid, courtier.'' Vera's dedication to her husband's needs makes Pelagie look like an amateur. Artful and amusing, Schiff's biography is a remarkable achievement given her subject's unparalleled talent for self-effacement. ''The more you leave me out,'' Vera told Nabokov's biographer Brian Boyd, ''the closer to truth you will be.''

Unable to make a case for the wife's literary talents, the helpmeet feminist is obliged to turn wifely devotion and domestic servitude into acts of collaboration. ''She was a full creative partner in everything her husband did,'' Schiff declares of Vera. ''But she was not a writer. She was just a wife.'' Like Virginia Woolf and her disciples, the helpmeet feminist believes there's a great woman behind every Great Man. The difference is that behind is where the helpmeet chooses to be, and the feminists love her for it. Versatility with the feather duster or the White Out bottle is evidence of the extraordinary. Betty Friedan would be appalled.

To the helpmeet feminists, however, it's axiomatic: literary creation is a conjugal act, the joint property of the betrothed. In England, the biographer and feminist Lyndall Gordon has opened a one-woman campaign against Great Men who skimped on spousal credit and greedily claimed their creative output as their own. In ''T.+S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life,'' Gordon excoriated the poet for suppressing the influence on his work of Vivienne, his first wife, and Emily Hale, an American teacher to whom he sent about a thousand letters. But Eliot was just a warm-up. In ''A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and His Art,'' Gordon makes the breathtaking argument that the Old Master -- a lifelong bachelor who may have been gay -- was indebted for his literary accomplishments to collaborators not only female but dead: his cousin Minny Temple, felled by tuberculosis at 24, and a novelist friend named Constance Fenimore Woolson, a suicide in 1894. Less biographer than prosecutor, Gordon is trying James for fraud: ''Here is a starting point: to challenge the myth of the artist with a truer story of what we might call, for want of a better word, collaboration. To some extent, of course, James invented himself, but he could not have written as he did without partners -- female partners, posthumous partners -- in that unseen space in which life is transformed into art.''

No doubt Gordon is right that ''the death of Fenimore, like that of Minny, aroused intense and unaccustomed emotion.'' And it's entirely conceivable that James saw in these women ''a match of sorts, vital to his art.'' Milly Theale, the tubercular heroine of ''The Wings of the Dove'' (1902), shares an obvious resemblance to the by then long-dead cousin Minny.

Such revelations make for moving reading, but are they proof of moral turpitude? Isn't this precisely what writers do: take inspiration from the lives of people they know? Do we really owe the muse or helpmeet a cover line -- let alone an entire volume devoted to her literary contribution? One baffled reviewer of Gordon's book confessed, ''Even if both women were unquestionably interesting specimens of liberal American womanhood in the late 19th century, neither seemed -- to this reader at least -- sufficiently distinctive to warrant such close and extended attention.''

Maybe it's a question of proportion. As the wives and relatives of important writers, Pelagie, Vera and Minny have an obvious place in literary history. But to award them literary status as well is risky. Not only does it seem to rationalize the considerable social pressures that kept wives from becoming writers in the first place, but it inadvertently diminishes the achievement of those women who -- against the odds and before feminism redistributed their domestic burdens somewhat -- managed to be both.

On that score, it's something of a relief to read ''Partisans,'' David Laskin's account of the tempestuous domestic lives of Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt, Elizabeth Hardwick and Jean Stafford. All of these women manage to pull off a successful writing career while more or less fulfilling traditional wifely duties for their difficult, demanding, distinctly unfeminist writer husbands (among them no less than Edmund Wilson and Robert Lowell). How, Laskin wonders, as he chronicles an unending saga of infidelities, breakdowns, alcoholism, divorce and despair, did these women do it? In the end it's not entirely clear, but Laskin's awed tone seems an appropriate response to the mystery.